Thanks for that link. I had been sort of hoping for reasons not to believe this, because it's sort of lose/lose (bad if our elections are being hacked, bad if a recount happens and 'magically' the president-elect changes, etc etc).

Thanks for the link. One question I'd pose to Nate is how multicollinear were the paper factor and the additional predictors? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicollinearity

Estimates can be unstable if multicollinearity is too high, say if only richer more educated districts use a certain type if voting machine.

This is why we need statistically inclined journalists. The problem is that this makes journalism even more expensive.

Does Nate Silver have any credibility left when it comes to adjusting numbers based on assumptions?

Considering how drastically wrong they got things.

He's always been very open about the models they use (though not the parameters of the secret sauce) as well as the errors they've made, which says a lot to me. And while they were off, I do think they've been earnest in figuring out what the limitations of their model were: as they did during the campaign as well. They've also been very clear in pointing out the difficulty in making predictions of singular events. Others may pay lip service to this, or say nothing all.

You could also read this as him being weasels from the get go. From what I've seen, that's not warranted in his case.

A last point I always have to remind myself of: human psychology just doesn't do stats well. That's why we have these tools. Kinda like quantum physics or relativity. We are smart enough to figure out the math, but the results—or our interpretations of them— don't always jive with our intuitions.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. 538 projected the election at 70/30, which gave Trump a much bigger chance than all other models. Moreover, the final outcome of an electoral college/popular vote split was a specific risk Nate Silver called out repeatedly.

One day I will comprehend how Nate Silver has managed to be, in one election cycle, vilified for both being TOO bullish on Trump's chances, and then just as equally vilified for not saying Trump would outright win.

It's the same way that Progressive Liberals call Obama a fascist, but Conservatives call him a socialist. It obviously can't be both, yet both sides strenuously believe it.

In American parlance, the Nazis were socialist ("it's even in the name"), so fascists and socialists can cohabitate in the same party.

Fascism isn't really "far right" in the same way socialism and communism are "far left". Fascists believe in a mix of typically far-right and typically far-left ideas. You need more than one dimension (probably at least three or four) to fit fascism into the political spectrum.

So if one of your axes is "economic protectionism", another is "level of state intervention in the economy" and a third is "nationalism", and fascism is pegged to the max on all of those, it's not too unreasonable to call it "national" (because of the first and third axes) and "socialist" (because of the second).

It is almost as if all combinations of political and economic systems can't be mapped to a one dimensional spectrum...

Yeah but maintaining America's rigid dichotomy ensures we never progress outside entrenched corporate interests.

As they say, if both sides all of the sudden hate you, you must be doing something right.

The argument would be that he was hedging his bets so either way he could say "oh I predicted the clinton win" vs "Oh well, I gave trump a good chance".

Anyway, the problem was the actual companies conducting polls.

How so? He had Trump winning probability at about 25%, he even explicitly highlighted:

- If Trump wins, chances are he looses the popular vote - Likely polling errors are not independent across states

538 had a higher chance of Trump winning that basically any other poll based source pre election.

Do you have ANY idea how probability works? If you are going to roll a 6 sided die, and you ask me, "What is the probability that I will roll something besides a 6?" I will tell you that you have about an 83% chance of rolling a 6. If you roll, and you get a 6, it doesn't mean I was WRONG on the probability. It just means your roll fell into that 17% chance of getting a 6.

You can't take the result of one election and decide if Nate Silver is right or wrong in his probability. Instead, you have to take his many predictions and see how accurate they are; do his 90% predictions come true 90% of the time, do his 80% predictions come true 80% of the time, etc.

You can't take one time where he said Hillary had a 70% chance of winning, and say he was wrong because she lost.

But if you look at the hundreds of polls that all had Hillary winning by a wide margin, you can realize that there is a major problem with them.

He was the least wrong of the mainstream pundits and was under attack for suggesting that Trump was "one normal polling error" from winning.

Also, he actually did predict both the Cubs and Trump back on May 10th, albeit as a joke:

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/730251094614528000

Yes, his election prediction was the least wrong of all the high-profile public predictions.

Between the World Series and the presidential election, I'd say he has been demoted to Nate Plastic.

What did he get wrong with the election? As others have pointed out, he gave Clinton a 70% chance of winning. The fact that Trump won was not unrealistic in the slightest (30% chance).

Can we not have this /r/The_Donald crap here please?

I'm not a Trump supporter or a Redditor...